About Diet - Part 3

It's time for a gut check

The microbiome, as accurately portrayed by AI

When I was a kid I had a lot of stomach aches and digestive problems. My parents took me to many different doctors, but this was back when medicine was only a few weeks past leeches and herb poultices. None of them ever came up with anything useful. As an adult I would randomly get episodes of what would now be called irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It was hard to narrow down to a particular food. Eventually I just accepted that it was something I had to live with.

I now realize that the condition that plagued me most of my life was dysbiosis, a condition that causes beneficial bacteria in the gut to be outnumbered by harmful bacteria. Over time the bad guys actually start wearing away the very thin lining of the small intestine, allowing digesting food particles to leak into the bloodstream. That created the symptoms that caused all my grief.

Gut Check

We tend to think that all bacteria are bad, but some of them are essential for our well being. That fiber I talked about in part 2 is one of the things they feed on. There are even some vitamins and chemical compounds that we need that come from the bacteria that we carry around with us. While there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of books and websites dedicated to Keto, very few of them mention gut bacteria. That’s a shame, because those little bugs are crucial to getting healthy and staying that way.

The microbiome, which is what the world of microscopic organisms is called, is the heart of what could be called a second brain. All the plumbing, from the stomach down, is in constant communication with the brain inside your skull. These signals travel on the vagus nerve, the largest one in the body. It’s the one that gives you the well-known short term headache when you eat your ice cream too fast.

Dysbiosis can be caused in different ways. A diet heavy in sugar promotes the microbes that live on sugar and are not beneficial to us. They also produce methane and those odors that everyone blames on the dog. Antibiotics are another enemy of the gut biome, since they kill all bacteria, good and bad.

So why the science lesson? Aren’t we here to talk about a healthy diet? Of course. And if you want to be truly healthy, you must think about all those tenants that are counting on you to keep their quarters in good shape. How do we do that? You may think the answer is probiotics. These are capsules filled with good bacteria. Take those, and you’re good, right? Well, maybe not.

The problem with commercial probiotics is that you have no idea what is lurking in those capsules. Sure, they list a bunch of bacteria species with names in Latin, but who knows what they are? They are also quite pricey, and may be of no value at all. There is a better way: fermented foods.

Fermenting has been around for thousands of years. You already know that’s how wine is made, and you know it is done to preserve the grape juice. Fermentation has also been used as a food preservative, long before we had refrigeration. The good bacteria take a small portion of the food, and in return kill off the bad bacteria that spoil it. For example, yogurt is made by a bacteria called Acidophilus, which means acid-loving. It feeds on the lactose in milk, producing a mild acid. That keeps the yogurt from spoiling, well past the time that milk alone would sour.

Like so much of the helpful health information I’ve learned, Dr. Cate explained it in her groundbreaking book Deep Nutrition. Her advice is simple: Eat something fermented or sprouted every day. That gives you a low-cost effective probiotic, and it conditions your digestive system to be more effective.

There is a cultural connection here as well. Our family has a tradition of eating sauerkraut on New Year’s Day to insure a prosperous and successful year. I would eat a small dish of it only on that day. It reminded me of my great grandmother, who had a large wood barrel on her back porch that she used to make ‘kraut. The smell alone was enough to send me running.

But after reading Dr. Cate’s words, I started eating a small dish of sauerkraut a couple of times each week. Soon it wasn’t bad, and it actually went quite well with sausage. I had been eating yogurt, and I started looking for other fermented foods to give my microbiome some different neighbors. That led me to kimchi, which has become my new favorite.

After a few weeks of this I noticed that my digestion had changed. It didn’t hurt any more. Things started to feel better and better, until one day I realized that a mental fog I’d had for at least 20 years had lifted. I started remembering things from high school, and all the years in between. I was thinking more clearly than I had in many years. This all happened before I found Maria Cross, who explains it much better than I can in her Substack.

IBS, and How a Leaky Gut can Lead to a Leaky Brain

Sprouted Grain

We’ve all heard the saying, “Man does not live by bread alone.” After you’ve been on Keto for a while, you probably think of it as, “Man does not live by bread at all.” I had given up ever having bread again, but once again Dr. Cate opened my eyes to sprouted grain bread. Having grown sprouts in the kitchen for salad, I had the idea that such a loaf would be covered in tiny green leaves. No, it’s not like that.

Why are grains bad, other than the carbohydrates they introduce? What we call grain is actually the seeds of grasses, such as wheat, rye, barley, and the like. The coating on the seeds is indigestible. When an animal eats it, that coating causes the seed to pass through the animal unharmed, where it gets dropped in a new location, packaged in fertilizer. This strategy works in the plant’s favor, so it spreads.

Our cave-dwelling ancestors discovered that, while you could store grains for a very long time, they were not very easy to eat because of that hard covering. At some point they discovered that they could let the seeds sprout, and then they could be made into food. They later discovered that they could just grind the seeds into the powder we call flour, and make food with that. Even easier!

But with grinding there is a catch. That indigestible coating around the seed is now in the flour. It’s designed to make the body want to get rid of it, and it prevents nutrients from being properly absorbed. That’s disruptive to digestion, which is not good, no matter what diet you are on.

A few bakeries have gone back to the ancient process of making bread with sprouted grain. It’s more complicated, and thus much more expensive. It’s also a lot healthier because it doesn’t contain what they call anti-nutrients. The largest producer of sprouted grain bread is probably Food For Life. Their Ezekiel 4:9 bread is made using a recipe straight out of the Bible. The website explains why they do it and the advantages of sprouting the grain. This bread is sold mainly at health food stores, or upscale supermarkets. It is found in the freezer, because it contains no preservatives. After we open a loaf, we keep it in the refrigerator for the same reason

Unlike the mushy white bread you find in every store, this one is a dark color that screams HEALTHY, and the loaf is much heavier than you might expect. We use it mostly for the roast beef sandwiches we eat on weekends, lightly toasted and slathered heavily in butter. We’ve also discovered that it makes a great, if expensive, dressing at Thanksgiving.

If you’ve been on Keto long enough to reach your goal weight, you might give sprouted grain bread a try. But if you’re still working on getting into ketosis and burning fat, I’d suggest waiting. There are recipes all over the Internet for fake breads. On example might be Cloud Bread. Most of them are made with coconut or almond flour, lots of eggs, and the end result is not something you’d ever use to make a sandwich. That said, those recipes can help you overcome cravings.

Resistance

Of all the cuisines available, one that is very close to Keto is Tex-Mex. It’s a unique blend of Mexican dishes modified through Texas traditions. Many of the dishes are almost Keto. Take fajitas, for example. You have grilled beef or chicken (Keto) with grilled vegetables (Keto) wrapped in a tortilla (Nope). Or maybe a burrito, with a meat filling (👍) wrapped in a tortilla (👎). These were near misses, until recently. A new company, La Banderita (in English, the little flag) has come out with a line of Keto tortillas. The net carbs on these is near zero. How is this possible?

Traditional tortillas are made with wheat flour. That’s bad in two ways: 1) the coating on the grain that gets into the ground flour, and 2) the starch in that flour that becomes glucose. In essence, starches are just sugar wearing a disguise. So how do they get rid of those pesky carbs?

The secret is in resistant starch. It turns out that some starches, when heated and then cooled, become resistant to breaking down into sugar. They just pass through the digestive system without doing much of anything. The clever folks at La Banderita have figured out how to use resistant wheat starch in lieu of flour to make these amazing tortillas. Of course tortillas are a huge business, so they are not the only company doing this. Others do as well, but all the other tortillas I’ve found labeled ‘Keto’ use an unhealthy seed oil. La Banderita uses olive oil, which is healthy.

We use a lot of these tortillas. Sometimes we’ll take a grass-fed beef sausage and wrap it up like a hot dog. We may mix scrambled eggs and sausage to fill one as a breakfast burrito. When we have a salad meal, which is frequently in the hot summer months, we take a couple of small tortillas, warm them, and cover them in grass-fed butter. Rolled up they make a great alternative to a dinner roll.

But the resistant starch miracle doesn’t end there. Mashed potatoes can be cooked, cooled overnight in the refrigerator, and then warmed up for eating. Each time this process occurs, the starch becomes more resistant.

This trick also works with rice, and there is an additional hack that can be done with rice. We cook it in an Instant Pot, one of our favorite kitchen gadgets. As soon as the cooking is done we add some coconut oil to the hot rice. It melts immediately, and then we stir to spread it over all the rice. This also reduces the carbohydrate load from the rice. It does add a mild coconut flavor to the rice, but we like that.

I’ve included this section to illustrate some of the tools we use to make Keto a lifestyle instead of just a diet. The resistant starch products and techniques are best left until you have achieved your weight goal. Knowing that they are there can make it easier to stay the course when you are working on keeping your carb count low.

Originally this was to be the end of this series. As I write, though, I keep thinking of other things I need to tell you. So there will be at least one more part, and it may be one of the most important. Thanks for sticking with me. Regaining my health through diet has been transformative for my wife and I. Like a former smoker, I am compelled to share my experience with others who may benefit from it. I hope that by doing that, I can help you to enjoy a long and healthy life.